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White wins Academy Award in Music

Posted March 30, 2009; 10:54 a.m.

by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

Barbara White, associate professor of music, has received an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award, given to White and three others, "honors outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledges the composer who has arrived at his or her own voice," according to the academy.

White will receive $7,500 for the award and an additional $7,500 toward the recording of one work.

A composer and clarinetist, White has received commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, the Fromm Foundation and the Koussevitzky Foundation. Her CD recordings include "When the Smoke Clears" and "Apocryphal Stories." White's scholarly work concentrates on analysis of the "nuts and bolts" of musical design with an investigation of cultural context.

White has taught courses on the relationship between high and low cultures in the musical landscape and the interdependence of sound and image in dance and film. She joined the Princeton faculty in 1998.